If you value your mental health and your earning potential, you'll avoid Perl.
So many better languages with better mental models. And I say this with a decade of Perl experience.
Don't suffer from the blub paradox.
So many better languages with better mental models. And I say this with a decade of Perl experience.
Don't suffer from the blub paradox.
And yes, it is still used for new projects, and no it is not necessary to sacrifice your mental health nor your earning potential to use it.
It is not, nor will it ever be the darling of the startup world. But most of the software development in the world is not done at startups.
I'm not saying you'll get rich writing Perl, nor am I saying that it is growing in "market share" if you want to call it that. In fact, considerably less people use it now than did in the past.
However, you can still make a decent living writing Perl in 2020.
Of course, my advice would be to learn multiple languages, and most importantly, never stop being willing to learn new things, if you want to be a developer your entire career.
I also think it's important to be willing to occasionally learn old things. You never know when you might be called on to make changes (sometimes extensive ones) to a legacy system, and "rewriting it in language 'X'" is often not an option.
[edited for typo]
For instance, I've heard PHP get shit on pretty badly all around the web, but I've worked at PHP shops that had nice, clean codebases, and my current Perl codebase is, in many ways, nicely structured. That's not to say there aren't some hairy codepaths that could use refactoring, but I really think that kind of thing, again, can happen in almost any language.
I am not a pro developer, just an amateur one who was surprised to see a mention of an old love.
Can you expand on what you mean by this?